Windpower Engineering & Development editors Michelle Froese and Paul Dvorak are in Orlando Florida covering what is possibly the U.S. wind industry’s most important annual event. Here’s their perspective on the first day’s events.
Windpower 2015 began today with presentations by several ABB personnel with the goal of providing ideas for optimizing wind farm operations. Several company engineers presented on topics ranging from applications for optimizing transformer performance to improving forecasting capabilities.
The depth of presentations was limited by time but still touched on cleaning power that comes from a range of problems such as transient overvoltages and subsynchronous resonances. One of the more general subjects dealt with integrating a wind farm near a collection of Canadian native American villages. The villages has been spending excessive amounts for diesel generated power and are planning to trim those costs with wind power and later with a large battery for power storage.
Sameer Kapoor spoke of a curious method of measuring incoming wind speed and direction: three spinner mounted sensors. The system is called iSpin from ROMO. Data from this arrangement would then be fed to the control system for more accurate yaw direction. He said that on an average wind farm 29% of the turbine has yaw misalignments that range from 4 to 10%. Other curious figures: A yaw error of 18° can result in 9.5% profit loss. A final presentation by Clinton Davis dealt with the value of improved power and weather forecasting and how it can positively affect an entire organization.
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